Politics - News Analysis

Veterans Day Reminder That Trump’s Father Price Gouged Soldiers Returning From War Who Needed Housing

Happy Veterans Day everyone!

The Veterans Day holiday is a day where we honor those brave men and women who fought for our country, and for all the sacrifices they took to be in service to our country.

Do you know who didn’t sacrifice anything? Donald Trump and his family.

A reminder than Donald Trump, the Commander-on-Chief, is a 5-time draft dodger.

The doctor who wrote the false report that Trump had bone spurs did it as a favor to Fred Trump, so his son wouldn’t have to go to war.

Trump is wealthy today because of his father and American government housing subsidies.

While still a young man, he inherited his father Fred’s real-estate empire, worth tens of millions of dollars.

The senior Trump made his fortune by building middle-class housing financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

In the 1930s, Fred Trump built single-family homes for middle-class families in Queens and Brooklyn, using mortgage subsidies from the newly created FHA in order to obtain construction loans.

After his real-estate business fell on hard times, he revived his firm during World War II by constructing FHA-backed housing for U.S. naval personnel near major shipyards along the East Coast. After the war, he continued to rely on FHA financing to construct apartment buildings in New York’s outer boroughs.

In 1954, when Donald was eight years old, his father was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on allegations that he had ripped off the government to reap windfall profits through his FHA-insured housing developments in New York.

At the hearings, Fred Trump was called on the carpet for profiteering off of public contracts, including overestimating the construction costs of his projects in order to get larger mortgages from FHA, and price gouging soldiers returning from war. Under oath, he reluctantly admitted that he had wildly overstated the development costs of one of these projects, the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn, by at least $3.7 million.

Besides providing housing aid to low-income families, HUD is also responsible for enforcing the Fair Housing Act, which Congress passed in 1968 to outlaw racial discrimination against prospective tenants and homebuyers by banks, developers, and landlords.

Trump’s father, and then Trump himself, frequently ran afoul of that law.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the New York City Commission on Human Rights and other fair housing organizations and activists documented Trump’s routine practice of turning away potential black tenants.

One New York state investigation discovered that there were only seven black families living in the 3,700-unit Trump Village complex in Brooklyn. Black families in New York knew that they were unwelcome in Fred Trump’s apartment buildings. They were typically told that his buildings had no vacancies, even when they knew that white tenants had no problem finding apartments in the same properties.

The senior Trump used a variety of tactics to keep blacks out of his buildings. If a black person applied for an apartment in one of his buildings, Trump would tell rental agent Stanley Leibowitz to “take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,” Leibowitz recalled in a recent interview with The New York Times. The Times also reported that “a former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter ‘C’ on it-for ‘colored’-to any application filed by a black apartment-seeker.”

In 1973 the Justice Department did its own investigation and sued Trump Management for violating the Fair Housing Act for discriminating against blacks. The government named both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, as defendants. Like the scandal surrounding his father’s FHA rip-off, the Justice probe embarrassed Donald, who was just then making his way into New York’s upper social circles and testing the waters of celebrity. Donald called the allegations “absolutely ridiculous,” and said the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients.”

Rather than settle the case, the junior Trump hired Roy Cohn, the high-powered attorney who had served as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s redbaiting counsel, to defend him. At Cohn’s suggestion, Trump sued the Justice Department, but the assigned judge dismissed the countersuit. Two years later, the Trumps reluctantly signed a consent decree that required them to desegregate their apartment buildings, including a mandate that Trump Management provides the New York Urban League, a civil-rights group, with a weekly list of all its vacancies.

In 1978, however, Justice accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a DOJ lawyer wrote to Cohn. But the Trumps outlasted the government’s efforts. Before the DOJ could gather enough evidence to take Trump to court, the original consent decree had expired.

meet the author

Nicole Hickman James is a lifelong Democrat and political activist who first cut her teeth as a teenager volunteering for Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign. She has worked and volunteered for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, HFA (Hillary For America), and Organizing For Action. She’s passionate about liberal and progressive causes and considers President Obama her favorite president ever. She holds her Bachelor’s from Boston College in Economics and her Master's from Columbia, also in Economics. When not working as a writer, she enjoys traveling and spending time with her three college-aged children.

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